Review of Terry Eagleton's "After Theory"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Being a theorist – cultural, literary, or anything else – could be intimidating if you’re doing it after the impressively productive years of the ‘60s and ‘70s. These were the acme years of people like Habermas, Derrida, Bourdieu, Foucault, Lyotard, Rorty, Jameson, and several others who played a major role in completely reshaping what theory means inside and outside of academic discourse. In “After Theory,” Eagleton confronts a world where many of these people’s ideas, once considered controversial, are now practically de rigueur. He also shows himself to be a very different thinker than I’ve always assumed him to be. His socialism has hardly abated, but for some reason, I always had him pegged as a staunch postmodernist, too. But that couldn’t be further from the case.

The structure of the book is a bit confused and unfocused. The first half consists of statements about the birth of postmodern theory which are true enough, but Eagleton gives you no idea of what he’s trying to establish or any point he’s trying to make. Perhaps he was trying to spell out some basic postmodern assumptions: a deep distrust of grand narratives, truth, and objectivity, and an overt focus on culture that wasn’t there in modernism. The second half quickly becomes focused and razor-sharp. He comes out to defend the idea of truth, objectivity, and the morality and ethics as theoretical pursuits. And he makes these arguments brilliantly – by showing that, if postmodern assumptions were true, then postmodernism itself couldn’t be, i.e. by showing that it’s internally inconsistent. To pick an exceedingly simple example, if truth didn’t exist, then neither could the statements of postmodernism be considered true. He ends by saying that postmodernists have a bad history of associating all of these things – narratives, truth, objectivity, et cetera – with fundamentalism, and showing why this makes absolutely no sense. 

If you’re even somewhat familiar with the overall shape that theory has taken over the last fifty or so years, and have serious doubts about some of its claims, you’ve probably thought about some of the things that Eagleton talks about here. I know I have. I just wish that I was able to articulate them so capably. There’s one major gripe that I have with the book: some of his pronouncements about American leaders and foreign policy seem grossly strident and out of place. Whether one agrees or not isn’t really the point, either: they just looked embarrassing in a book in a book that was mostly about the internal contradictions of postmodernism and critical theory. Well, that, and the slow, bumbling start that I mentioned above. But if you stick with it, he does actually get around to making some important points that really make you scratch your head as to how these ideas could have been held so uncritically by such otherwise intelligent people.